Wednesday, November 15, 2017

Fake news versus real news: Is there a difference?

Donald Trump in his
presidential campaign last year popularized the practice of labelling news reports
with which one disagrees “fake news.” Since then, the practice of calling news reports
“fake news” has proliferated, spreading among conservatives and liberals.

Is there a difference between “fake
news” and “real news”?

In answering that question, I want
to avoid using the word “truth” and its cognates. Truth has too many meanings
to permit easy use in this context. A friend and I had an extended conversation
on Ethical Musings some years ago about the nature of truth. He argued that if
truth does exist, it is impossible for humans to know truth with certainty, a
position akin to that of Hegel’s postmodern individualism.

On some issues I agree with my
friend. For example, nobody can prove that God (a human word denoting ultimate
reality) does or does not exist. Furthermore, given the unknowability of ultimate
reality and the limitations of human language, each person lives with her or
his own truth with respect to God. Witnesses to a crime (or any other incident)
similarly have personalized, unique memories of the event, shaped by the individual’s
inherently selective perception of the event, pre-existing brain patterns that
process those perceptions, and their brain’s retention or non-retention of those
processed perceptions. Again, truth is highly individualized. Yet another
example of the elusiveness of truth is the partial displacement by, and uneasy
coexistence of, Newtonian physics and quantum physics.

However, I disagreed with my
friend about other issues. In these instances, the word “truth” has a different
meaning. “Truth” may denote a fact (or set of facts) or perception supported by
the available evidence that was accumulated from multiple sources to ensure its
validity and then tested for reliability. Illustratively, if numerous people
describe a wall as red and a properly calibrated spectrometer agrees with that
description, then I believe that we can truthfully say “the wall is red,” with
the word “red” connoting the absorption of all light except that of wave
lengths that humans usually describe in English as “red.”

By this standard, “fake news” denotes
a news report in which the reported facts do not cohere to valid, reliable facts.
Of course, opinions about the import of the facts will often vary widely. In
the case of opinion, whether a person expressed a particular point of view is
an issue of fact; the opinion, per se, represents a form of relative truth, personally
determined.

To illustrate the distinction between
fact and opinion, consider reports of Russian meddling in the 2016 US
elections. Factually, the Russians meddled. The preponderance of evidence is valid
(actually reveals Russian attempts to interfere in the election) and reliable
(comes from highly trustworthy, multiple independent sources). Reports of
Russian meddling are not fake news but real or true. However, far less certain
is whether the Trump campaign colluded or was aware of that meddling, at this
time more a matter of opinion than fact. Concern about the integrity of US elections
should prompt continuing efforts to resolve the truth of all such claims.

Civil discourse and the search
both meaning both require clarity about truth. I’m deeply disturbed that claims
of “fake news” are proliferating in an effort to dismiss uncomfortable truths,
i.e., facts one strongly prefers to discredit and then ignore. Distinguishing “real
news” from “fake news” requires the hard work of setting aside personal
prejudices to dig into available data and engage in the careful, time-consuming
analysis. On occasion, the process may entail suspending judgment until sufficient
valid, reliable data becomes available.